[Talk-us] Kern County progress

[Nathan Mixter]

  I have begun cleaning up the area around Kern County, California. It is starting to not only look better but be less cluttered.

I originally imported landuse data from both Kern County and the City
 of Bakersfield. Some areas from these two agencies overlapped around 
Bakersfield, and I have been going through and trying to remove these. 
The city data were quite good and included landuse areas, buildings, 
parks and even individual trees within the city. The county data tended 
to be generic in several places. It also was slightly misaligned in 
spots particularly in the rural areas, possibly due to the projection it
 was created with by the county.

I have been going through and systematically deleting the redundant 
areas and breaking down the over used landuse=farm and 
landuse=residential tags into more specific areas. And in the process, I
 have been covering some of the ugly white space that has remained 
empty.

A lot of the areas are now natural=heath. There is not really any 
good way to differentiate between meadow and heath areas. Still seems 
like they can be used interchangeably sometimes. I've been trying to use
 meadow for an area that can be used for grazing. I just started using 
the heath tag for open areas generally on areas east of Highway 5. It's 
not a perfect option but at least it kind of matches the work others 
have done around Las Vegas and in the desert.

I've been trying to integrate the existing Kern County data with the 
FMMP farm data, which I have imported for other counties around the 
state as well. 
As part of the cleanup, I am adding some new buildings in Bakersfield from city data. I am only adding new building that have been added since the original import and verifying that they don't exist to avoid dups. Probably less than 1,000 total new buildings. Originally, I included bak:fac_type1, bak:fac_type2 and bak:fac_type3 tags on some buildings to correspond to tags in the data. These are not needed and can be removed en mass by a script in the future. I am leaving those tags out and incorporating them into the building= tag (ie building=residential, building=commercial) for new buildings.I also created a long overdue Kern County page on the wiki to keep track of the changes (http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Kern_County,_California).
Thanks to everyone who has contacted me to help out with the cleanup and offered advise. If anyone is interested in helping or has any suggestions, feel free to jump in or let me know.Nathan,


 		 	   		  
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.openstreetmap.org/pipermail/talk-us/attachments/20120820/6be8d5b2/attachment.html>